html-link-made

grobe@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu (Michael Grobe)
From: grobe@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu (Michael Grobe)
Message-id: <9305101949.AA25038@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: html-link-made
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Date: Mon, 10 May 93 14:49:41 CDT
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL2]

readers:

chapter 6 of the march 15, 1993 version of "Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML)" by Berners-Lee and Connolly discusses "Link Relationship values."

i have several questions about this chapter:

first, what is its status? are there browsers in use that recognize
these link attribute values? have any of these attributes been promoted
to be part of the standard?  are they likely to become part of the
standard? if so, when and under what authority?

second, if browsers ignore attribute values that they do not recognize, why
must these "experimental" values be preceded with "X-".

third, are there any example documents showing the use of these values?

fouth, is the value "Made" correctly described in this chapter?
the chapter says that Made means that the:

   Person (etc) described by node A is author of, or is responsible for B

where A is the source document and B is the destination document. however, 
the chapter also says that one use for the value is "for sending
mail to authors," and it seems to me that Made would be more useful if
A and B were reversed in the definition above.
that is, it seems more useful for a document to contain a pointer to a file
describing an author where the link relationship would be "Made" with
the understanding that the person described in B is the author of A.
can someone clarify this (what seems to me to be a) discrepancy?

fifth, since we are looking for a way to connect html documents with
their authors or responsible authorities, the value Made appears to be
a possible approach.  but, i would be interested in knowing any other
conventions for recording such information that may be planned or under
discussion.  i would actually prefer (at least intuitively) to have
a tag defined for the document <head> section that could be used to
record responsibility for the document.  for example, <owner> could
be defined and have name, organization, and e-mail address as attributes.
our browser could then pick up the owner e-mail address for posting
comments from users reading a particular file directly to the owner.
in particular, we might have the following tag 
     <owner name="Michael Grobe" e-mail="grobe@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu">
comments?

:michael grobe
academic computing services
the university of kansas